In the years leading up to the publication of Sandra Cisneros's TheHouse on Mango Street, a whole generation of experimental writerswere embrace the disjunctive possibilities of fragmented, episodicnovels. After a half-century in which stream-of-consciousness hadruled the roost of avant-garde writing, a new metaphor had emerged. Instead of the stream, the stone was now the idealblueprint—or rather, many stones. Novels werebroken up into bits and pieces, discontinuous andabrasive, fragments of prose that resisted thereader's best efforts to put them together into neat,symmetrical structures.

Italo Calvino, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, JulioCortázar, Gilbert Sorrentino, William Burroughs,Roland Barthes and many others participated inthis redefinition of progressive fiction. Their workstook little for granted, and raised questions abouteven the most basic constituent elements of thenovel: continuity of plot, the identity of characters,the nature of realism, even the structure of a sentence. Call it what you will—postmodernism, deconstruction,or simply the un-Joycing of the written word—the overall impact onthe literary world was profound. Cutting edge writers were dissectingthe novel, and leaving the entrails out for our inspection.

What I find most amazing about Sandra Cisneros is her ability, in themidst of this, to write a fragmented, episodic novel that resisted allof these fashionable tendencies of the day. She comprehended thatthe disjunctive novel could be accessible and inviting, even to youngteens who almost never read a book and had no interest in experi-mental fiction. Cisnero's role models for her bite-sized chapters, werenot Burroughs or Barthes, but the poem, the short story, and especiallythe diary and personal journal.

Cisneros was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when shestarted sketching out the first sections of The House on Mango Street,and she embarked on the project with a self-conscious sense ofresisting the impulses and influences around her. "I decided I wouldwrite about something my classmates couldn't write about," she later explained. Because she was in the poetry program, she couldn't getcredit towards her MFA for this work of fiction—although manysections read like prose poems—but she pushed ahead nonethelesswith her unusual novel.

And with extraordinary success. The House on Mango Street,published in 1984, has sold more than two million copies, and been translated into at least a dozen different languages. Few works offiction are assigned more often in classrooms, with Cisnero's bookshowing up everywhere, according to her website, from "inner-citygrade schools to universities." According to one source, The Houseon Mango Street is "the most prevalent Latino text not only in theUnited States but also in Europe."

It's easy to understand the appeal. Esperanza Cordero, the youngnarrator of The House on Mango Street, wears her heart on hersleeve, and shares with us a series of vignettes that are raw andlyrical by turns. Some of the chapters consist of just three or four paragraphs, others are three or four pages, but instead of theprickly pointilism of the postmodern prose stylists, Cisnero's offers something softer and more inviting—all the more striking, perhaps,when contrasted with the often harsh subjects dealt with in The Houseon Mango Street.

Face it, Cisneros covers all the bases. Before starting this book, Isuggest you make a list of the top ten anxieties associated withgrowing from adolescence into adulthood, and then while you read it,check off each one when Cisneros addresses it. I suspect that youwill find a check mark against each and every item before you reachthe last page. Tension with siblings? Check! Argument with bestfriend? Check! Peer pressure at school? Check! Friction withthe opposite sex? Check! Problems with the parents? Check!Neighborhood rowdies? Check! Thwarted ambitions and unrealized reams. Check and check!

I have nothing but praise for the skill with which Cisneros navigatesthrough these hot issues in her episodic treatment. Yet I must admitthat I am uneasy about the intentions of educators who have latchedon to this book as an entry-level novel for teen students—a book inwhich almost every incident has been crafted for relevancy to this demographic.

I grew up in an ethnically-mixed household (Mexican and Italian) inthe midst of a similarly mixed working class neighborhood. Neitherof my parents had gone to college, and few of our neighbors hadmore than a high school diploma, if that. But we realized the limitationsof our environment, and If my teachers had tried to get me to read abook of this sort—chosen for its extreme fit to my narrow experienceof the world—I would have felt that they were being patronizing and condescending. What I wanted from stories, at that age, was anopportunity to look beyond the closed world of my neighborhood,and experience (even if only vicariously through the written word) therest of the world—or, even better, the imaginary world. I was like Oscar Wao in Junot Díaz’s celebrated novel, who finds transcendence in stories that present a different plane of existence, not books that read like asibling's diary.

So even as I admire Cisneros's book, and laud its poetry andconfessional power, I question the mindset of educational powerbrokers who hold this book up as a role model for teaching—andespecially for teaching students who come from the Mango Streetsof our country, facing their own crisis of cultural deprivation and closed futures. Why not take these same students and give them a glimpseof the world beyond their home turf? Why not widen their purview and expand their horizons? Why force them, in their free imaginative lives,to continue in the same constraints of their day-to-day when, throughthe magic of fiction, no such limitations are necessary. Cisnerossucceeded in this book by rejecting the consensus and breaking therules. Maybe her institutional advocates ought to consider doing thesame thing themselves.

a website devoted to radical, unconventional and experimental fiction with a particular focus on the rise of modernism and its aftermath.